


Ground Floor

by vailkagami



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, spoilers for the season 9 finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-04
Updated: 2014-06-04
Packaged: 2018-02-03 10:15:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1740980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vailkagami/pseuds/vailkagami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam found a way that may restore his brother. Maybe he just found death. Either way, there is an end waiting at the finish line of this ritual.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ground Floor

A wooden bowl filled with water. A handful of earth. A candle, white, the flame perfectly still in the windowless room. Four elements. Three represented here. This one is easy.

Hands and voice and heart and soul. A sacrifice that costs nothing and gains nothing (something meaningless). It’s a riddle, one that demons cannot solve. Sam kneels in the circle, his movements so smooth and calm they barely disturb the flame, and thinks of all those who tried. Once a year. Every year. For as long as demons existed. Perhaps Lilith knelt here too, one early day, like him, between the water and the flame, and tried to open that door in front of him. But no – failure means destruction and she was not destroyed nor was did she succeed. The only explanation is that she never tried. (Neither did Ruby.)

Others did. Others still do, with painful regularity, to the point where this, the trying and failing has gained an almost religious meaning. Sam figures it is very young demons who try, or very old ones. Those who may have just left the rack with something like a memory of humanity still intact and those who simply grew tired. They come and they perform this ritual; they try to reach the Grace on the other side of the eternally closed door in front of him, the one that will burn the black smoke from their souls and make them beautiful again, but they can’t because they are demons and incapable of forming the ideas that will get them there. There is something inherently tragic in the notion, Sam thinks as he looks at the spots of old blood on the walls and floor. Not the demons’ blood – the destruction is clean, leaving no trace – but that of humans who fell victim to those who tried a more literal interpretation of the instructions. There is something inherently tragic about that, too.

Sam came here without a solution. As he sits in front of the water, the flame, the earth, he doesn’t know what to do, and the door behind him is already closed. He will complete the ritual, and either he will succeed or he will die. There is hopeful desperation connected to the first possibility, and nothing much to the second.

A ritual to cure demons that only demons can perform, bound to a riddle no demon can solve. The room opened to Sam and let him in, acknowledging him to be enough of demonic nature to apply. Or perhaps it recognized Lucifer’s vessel in him, as Sam suspects that the Prince of Lies set this whole thing up in the very beginning as a means for his amusement.

There is a knife, too, that Sam missed before. Metal blade and wooden handle. It lies beside the water bowl as if it belongs there and Sam wonders if it does, or if it was left behind like the blood. But, no. Everything that is here is meant to be here, including him.

He takes the knife. Hands and voice. Water and earth and fire. His hand is steady as he holds it over the water bowl. His blood, demonic in nature, from a body so often possessed it is barely his own and was never meant to be. He holds the blade against his palm for a long time, metal touching skin but not yet cutting. The water is so still the reflection is perfect. Sam imagines his blood dripping into it, the ripples it will cause. In the end, he draws the knife back without drawing blood and lets it go. Bringing the bowl to his face as if to drink, he disturbs the surface with his breath as he says, “No.”

He sets the bowl down and fills it with the earth until all the water is soaked up. With steady hands, as if he knew what was doing, he plugs a single long hair from his head and holds it to the flame that burns it away in less than a second, a heartbeat. (The tip of that hair was something Jess had touched.)

Nothing happens. He half-expects death with every movement, every action, but doesn’t receive it. Not yet. This isn’t over. If this is Lucifer’s game, he won’t know he failed until the end.

The circle of chalk he is sitting in is thousands of years old, the lines somehow untouched by dirt, blood and time. Sam knows, without anyone having to tell him, that the symbols are meant to glow when the room gets dark and that no one has ever made them. Demons have died in this place, taking this risk knowingly for the sake of regaining something lost. The thought leaves him with sadness. Who is he, he wonders, to even try, when he has nothing to gain from this himself?

Death for him, or salvation for his brother. Perhaps both. It seems arrogant and wrong, somehow – almost blasphemous, to be here and try when he has nothing to lose. Sam closes his eyes and wishes for a world in which “I love you” is not a murder weapon.

He blows out the candle.

 

3 June 2014

**Author's Note:**

> Written for my [genprompt-bingo card](http://vail-kagami.livejournal.com/188522.html). Prompt: _Religious and other festivals_


End file.
